Pioneer Works is pleased to announce the first Alternative Art School Fair featuring a showcase of 50 experimental art schools from around the world that map a growing landscape of innovative educational models.

Pioneer Works and AASF organizers Catherine Despont (Co-Director of Education at Pioneer Works); Alexandre Gurita (Director of IHEAP and Biennale de Paris), and Dylan Gauthier (Sunview Luncheonette, Co-Founder of Mare Liberum) will bring this global phenomenon to greater public awareness through interactive booths and a diverse roster of public programming that examines the role of arts education in the evolution of contemporary society. In keeping with the spirit of these schools, participation is free and each school has liberty to design and organize their booths.

In recent years, the arts have seen an unprecedented increase in cross-disciplinary practices. Artists across the globe are engaging in the social sciences, questioning institutional structures, and challenging outdated divisions in academic disciplines. In conjunction with this growing movement, there has been a surge of unconventional educational initiatives that are becoming significant forces in the effort to reimagine pedagogical experimentation and drive cultural evolution. These diverse educational initiatives operate with a wide range of missions and theoretical approaches that see the artist as a defining figure in the development of new methodologies for hybridized disciplines. Even when small in scale, these exploratory schools provide vital models of cultural critique and broaden the prevailing expectations of classroom environments and means of dissemination.

The AASF programming serves as a point of departure for participants to exchange resources, share missions, and foster relationships within the community to help elucidate the often-daunting process of starting or attending such a school. As part of the main stage event, Pioneer Works will host a keynote panel discussion on the role of the artist in society and ways that arts education engages with and defines cultural evolution. Among other questions, the public programming will ask what future pathways through arts education might look like, and discuss how to involve regions that have no art schools or lack arts education in their public schools.

The Alternative Art School Fair, including keynote presentations, workshops, and exclusive interviews with participants, will be streamed live and archived by Clocktower Productions on clocktower.org.

Tickets to the fair are 15 USD for a single day and 20 USD for the full weekend.